Father! Father! Burning Bright

By Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett's second story. This time, set in the 1970s, in classic Bennett country, Yorkshire. 'On the many occasions Midgley had killed his father, death had always come easily. He died promptly, painlessly and without a struggle. Looking back, Midgley could see that even in these imagined deaths he had failed his father. It was not like him to die like that. Nor did he.' Midgley is determined to deny his father a last occasion to be disappointed in him. He will do the right thing and sit by his father's bed-side in Intensive Care until he dies. But, even when he is unconscious, his father manages to make Midgley's life a misery. This is another classic story by Alan Bennett, with brilliant portraits of social hypocrisy and stifling family relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: May 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781782831518

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for the stage, including Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, A Question of Attribution, The Madness of King George Ill (together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George) and an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. The History Boys won Evening Standard, Critics' Circle and Olivier awards, as well as the South Bank Award. On Broadway, The History Boys won five New York Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics' Circle Awards, a New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Play, a New York Drama League Award and six Tonys including Best Play. The film of The History Boys was released in 2006. Alan Bennett's collection of prose, Untold Stories, won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, 2006. His 2009 play, The Habit of Art, received glowing reviews and was broadcast live the following year by National Theatre Live. In 2012 People premiered at the National Theatre to widespread critical acclaim. The film of The Lady in the Van starring Maggie Smith was released in 2015, sending Bennett's memoir of the same name to the top of the bestseller list for nine weeks.

Book preview

FATHER! FATHER! BURNING BRIGHT

The hospital rang the school to say Mr. Midgley’s father was dying. The timing was good. Only Midgley’s father would have managed to stage his farewell in the middle of Meet the Parents week.

Alan Bennett first appeared on the stage in Beyond the Fringe. His stage plays include Forty Years On, Habeas Corpus, Enjoy and Kafka’s Dick, and his adaptation of The Wind in the Willows and The Madness of George III were both presented at The Royal National Theatre. He has written many television plays, notably An Englishman Abroad and the Talking Heads monologues. The Lady in the Van, which originally appeared in the London Review of Books in 1989 and was then published by Profile Books, has recently been adapted for the stage. Writing Home, a collection of diaries and prose, came out in 1994 and his first story, The Clothes They Stood Up In, was published in 1998.

FATHER! FATHER!

BURNING BRIGHT

ALAN BENNETT

in association with

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

First published in book form

in Great Britain in 2000 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

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Previously published in 2000 by

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

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The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

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eISBN 978 1 78283 151 8

FATHER! FATHER!

BURNING BRIGHT

Father! Father! Burning Bright was the original title of a BBC television film I wrote in 1982 but which was subsequently entitled Intensive Care. The main part, Midgley, had been hard to cast, though when I was writing the script I thought it was a role I might play myself until, that is, I got to the scene where Midgley goes to bed with Valery, the slatternly nurse. That, I thought, effectively ruled me out as I didn’t fancy having to take my clothes off under the bored appraisal of an entire film crew.

Not that it would have been the first time. Back in 1966 I was acting in a BBC TV comedy series I had written which included a weekly spot, ‘Life and Times in NW1’, in one episode of which I was supposedly in bed with a neighbour’s wife. The scene was due to be shot in the studio immediately after a tea break, and rather than brave the scrutiny of the TV crew, I thought that during the break I might sneak on to the set and be already in bed when the crew returned. So I tiptoed into the studio in my underpants, failing to notice that a lighting rig had been positioned behind the bedroom door. When I opened it there was an almighty crash, the lights came down and everybody rushed into the studio to find me sprawled in my underpants among the wreckage and subject to a far more searching and hostile scrutiny than would otherwise have been the case. No more bedroom scenes for me, I thought.

However, the role of Midgley proved hard to cast and after a lot of toing and froing, including what was virtually an audition, I found myself playing the part. Like some other leading roles that I have written, it verged on the anonymous, all the fun and jokes put into the mouths of the supporting characters while Midgley, whom the play is supposed to be about, never managed to be much more than morose.

It was in the hope of finding more to the character than this that I decided, before the shooting started, to write the story up in prose. When I’d finished I showed it to the director in the hope that it might help him to appreciate what the screenplay was about. He received it politely enough and in due course gave me it back, I suspect without having read it, directors tending to form their own ideas about a text, one script from